Groves’ next fight to be announced in 24 hours, could fight on Bellew-Cleverly 2 card

By Boxing News - 10/23/2014 - Comments

groves0000By Scott Gilfoid: EBU super middleweight champion George Groves (20-2, 15 KOs) will be in action likely before the end of the year. He’s rumored to be fighting on the undercard of next month’s Nathan Cleverly vs. Tony Bellew 2 card, according to the Liverpool Echo. Groves’ promoter Kalle Sauerland said the date, venue and opponent for his next fight will be announced tomorrow.

Groves will likely be facing a fringe level opponent so that he can get slip in a stay busy fight to try and sharpen up for his eventual world title shot against WBC super middleweight champion Anthony Dirrell. Groves had been hoping to face Dirrell before Christmas, but that obviously isn’t going to be happening.

That fight won’t happen until next year, as Dirrell is no rush to get back in the ring right now after his grueling fight against former WBC 168 pound champion Sakio Bika.

There’s little chance that Sauerland will put Groves in with a good opponent for his next fight, because if he were to face a talented guy then were would be too high of a chance of him getting knocked out again. If Groves loses his next fight then won’t get the payday fight against Dirrell. The way I see it they might as well match Groves tough because he’s going to be really up against it when he gets inside the ring with Dirrell. At least if Groves faces a talented contender before that fight, he’ll be able to prove that he deserves the title shot against Dirrell.

What’s important for Groves is to try and look good, because he looked absolutely awful in his win over Christopher Rebrasse last month in winning a 12 round unanimous decision. Groves was hurt at least once in the fight, and looked exhausted by the 3rd round. Some boxing fans think the two consecutive knockout losses to IBF/WBA super middleweight champion Carl Froch took something out of Groves, and it’s hard to argue that these fans are wrong.

Groves looked worse than I’d ever seen him look before, and I’m not sure if he can get back to the level where he was previously. As it was, Groves had major flaws in his game going into the Froch fights, but he basically just highlighted them in a major way by exposing Groves’ chin and stamina issues for all those to see.

In their rematch last May, Groves conserved strength in fighting at a leisurely pace for the first 6 rounds, but once he turned it on in the 7th, he got knocked clean out by Froch. Groves was losing rounds until then, and he looked poor.

The WBC allowed Groves to fight in a WBC super middleweight eliminator bout despite the fact that he’d been knocked out in back to back fights in his two previous fights. That’s something that many boxing fans had a problem with. Additionally, the WBC rated a little known fighter named Rebrasse in their top 5 with him having only beaten one contender during his career.



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